Philosophical Doubt Research Articles

Motivating (Underdetermination) Scepticism

The aim of this paper is to analyse and develop how scepticism becomes an intelligible question starting from requirements that epistemologists themselves aim to endorse. We argue for and defend the idea that the root of scepticism is the underdetermination principle by articulating its specificity as a respectable epistemic principle and by defending it against objections in current literature. This engagement offers a novel understanding of underdetermination-based scepticism. While most anti-sceptical approaches challenge scepticism by understanding it as postulating uneliminated scenarios of mass deception, or as endorsing unnatural epistemic requirements, we argue here that both contentions are mistaken. Underdetermination-based scepticism targets our beliefs by issuing a genuine question about the rational support they enjoy. If we cannot establish that the sources of our beliefs provide them the required epistemic merit and authority, they lack non-arbitrary grounds. This has a sizable impact on what constitutes a satisfactory anti-sceptical strategy. Strategies that merely focus on the scenario-based aspect of scepticism, or on the truth-functional evaluation of our beliefs, are shown to miss the mark of the sceptical threat. The proposed analysis ultimately provides a shift in perspective concerning the character and reach of philosophical doubt.

Philosophical Doubts about reality

There are many pragmatisms, and it is a little misleading to present this variegated trend of thought as if it were a monolithic doctrine. The founding fathers, too, were all but unanimous. Peirce was not in agreement with James on many issues. Dewey, in turn, did not like various aspects of both Peirce’s and James’ philosophy, while C.I. Lewis’ views on logic were quite different from those held by Dewey. It should not be surprising, then, to find the same amount of disagreement in contemporary neo-pragmatism, where Rescher and Rorty, who both define themselves pragmatists, display different opinions on most subjects. I shall draw some comparisons between the ideas of these two thinkers.

The Crossroads: Interdisciplinary Teams and Alternative Treatments

Behavior analysts collaborating within interdisciplinary teams are likely to find themselves at difficult crossroads. Some of these crossroads include implementing alternative treatments, defining and determining risk and harm, and evaluating research and interventions. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of these crossroads and provide guidelines on successfully navigating them. We contend that it is possible to navigate these crossroads while minimizing harm or risk for the client, adhering to the principles of science and behavior analysis, and remaining respectful of all members of the interdisciplinary team. That is, we can maintain the scientific tenets of philosophic doubt, empiricism, and experimentation, while remaining humble, and ensuring our clients access the most effective interventions available.

The ‘radical critique of interviews’: a response to recent comments

ABSTRACT This paper responds to some recent discussions in the Journal about how interview data can be used. While recognising the value of detailed analysis of the discourse employed in interviews to identify its formal features, it is argued that such analysis is not essential for all the purposes for which interview data can be employed in social research; that informal understanding of everyday language use, built up through ordinary experience and during the course of inquiry, can often be relied upon. It is also argued that practical cautions against taking interview data at face value must not be conflated with philosophical doubts about whether interview data can serve as a source of evidence about anything beyond the interview context.

Consciousness: Knowing the Unknowable

Consciousness:Knowing the Unknowable Nicholas Humphrey (bio) the author of the book of proverbs was selective in revealing what he did not know. "There are three things that are too wonderful for me, yea four that I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid" (Proverbs 30:18). Here I shall pass over the first three of these unknowables, and touch only briefly on the fourth. I want to address another unknowable phenomenon of nature that many philosophers and scientists continue to declare too wonderful for them: the way of conscious sensation. Imagine yourself looking at a bright red wall. The red sensation you are now experiencing is unknowable in two fundamental ways. The first is privacy. The sensation is yours alone. No one else can know "what it's like" for you, just as you could not know what it's like for anyone else. The second is explanatory opacity. There is no known explanation for how this conscious experience can arise from the physics of your brain. It was John Locke, in his Essay of 1690, who first explicitly brought the problem of privacy to scholarly attention. If the idea that a violet produced in one man's mind by his eyes were the same that a marigold produces in another man's, and vice versa … this could never be known: because one man's mind could not pass into another man's [End Page 157] body, to perceive what appearances were produced. ([1690] 1975, §II.xxxii.15) But Locke was articulating a problem that it hardly requires a great philosopher to recognize. We have probably played with versions of the problem since we were children, raising questions in the playground to tease and annoy our school friends. How do I know you see red like I do? How do I know if you're really in pain? What if your smells are like my sounds? Ha ha, there's no way of knowing! Ha ha, indeed. But the conundrum also has a worrying side to it. You may well remember how strange and even upsetting it was at first discovery: not merely an interesting tease, but potentially a serious challenge to the need to share and understand. If we cannot even tell what seeing red is like for someone else, what can we tell? Imagine. We are walking together in the woods after the rain, dappled sunshine filters through the dripping leaves, a blackbird sings, and the scent of honeysuckle permeates the rich air. It may be that shared moments like this are needed to give meaning to our lives. What then when we realize how little we are truly sharing, that, if truth be told, each of us is merely coloring in the other's consciousness as if it were our own? Still, what is to be done? Realizing, early on, that the privacy of consciousness is a brute fact about the human condition, most of us as we grew up will have put the problem aside. Sometimes philosophical doubts, however cogent in theory, are hardly worth worrying about in practice. Samuel Johnson famously dismissed the Idealist suggestion that the external world is nothing other than an idea in his own head by kicking a stone and declaring, "I refute it thus." Whatever our first anxieties about the limits to our knowledge, our adult selves will probably want to brush them aside with a confident, plain-man's assertion that, in practice, we know all we need to know. As it happens, Locke himself unexpectedly pulled back from the brink of his own thought experiment about colors. In a passage, little known even to scholars, that follows the famous one quoted above, he wrote: [End Page 158] I am nevertheless very apt to think that the sensible ideas produced by any object in different men's minds, are indiscernibly alike. For which opinion there might be many reasons offered: but being besides my present business, I shall not trouble my reader with them: but only mind...

Ceticismo e tolerância em Montaigne

O ceticismo de Montaigne no campo prático e moral é caracterizado pela falta de um critério ou regras de conduta para que se possa consentir num padrão geral de comportamento ou numa tradição qualquer. O período no qual ele viveu era propício para reforçar este quadro: as guerras religiosas na França e em toda a Europa e a descoberta dos povos do Novo Mundo foram fatores fundamentais para o crescimento da dúvida filosófica acerca do comportamento individual e em sociedade organizada. Apesar disso, Montaigne denuncia as crueldades cometidas em seu tempo, seja entre os indígenas, seja entre os católicos e protestantes e, frequentemente, argumenta em favor da liberdade de consciência e opinião. Neste artigo mostrarei que a filosofia de Montaigne, não obstante seu ceticismo, é suscetível a uma ideia geral de tolerância entre diferentes povos e indivíduos, ainda que o conceito de tolerância não esteja sistematizado em seus escritos e que a sua defesa pareça incompatível com um determinado tipo de ceticismo.

Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil by John F. X. Knasas

Reviewed by: Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil by John F. X. Knasas Karina Robson Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil by John F. X. Knasas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), xvi + 304 pp. Professor John F. X. Knasas (University of St. Thomas, Houston), known as an “existential Thomist” for his emphasis on Aquinas’s metaphysics of being, has taken on one of the most hotly debated topics in philosophy of religion: the problem of evil. In Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil, Knasas does not shy away from addressing the “hard cases.” Along the way, he considers an impressive array of alternative positions, which makes sense since one of Knasas’s aims is to argue that there are several philosophically viable answers to how God and evil can coexist. Knasas also unfolds an innovative, metaphysically grounded philosophical psychology that helps explain why our prima facie intuitions about certain instantiations of being, their inherent preciousness, and evil are often incorrect, or at least philosophically unprovable. Finally, Knasas has clearly done his textual homework; in the course of the monograph, he probes myriad texts from Thomas on evil, most of which he translated by himself (often with additional references to other translations and related debates). There is a fluidity between Knasas’s interpretive and constructive projects that might present an obstacle to some interested readers. Even so, Knasas’s work is valuable well beyond the Thomistic discussion, due to its treatment of so many key alternative accounts, as well as the challenges he poses to them. Chapter 1 sets up the work via a discussion of Jacques Maritain’s insistence that human persons are irreplaceable “wholes” unto themselves. Although this sentiment is widespread and plays an important role in the literature on evil, Knasas argues over the course of the book that the truth of this idea can only be known theologically (viz., via [End Page 720] special revelation). In a purely philosophical context, even a theistic one, we can at most verify that human beings are “principal parts” of the universe. For Knasas, this means that other parts of the universe are generally, but not exclusively, oriented toward the good of such higher parts and that human beings have special obligations to each other on account of their status. Philosophy cannot prove, however, that human persons are ends in themselves whose individual flourishing God can never override for the sake of another individual, the species, or the universe more broadly. As Knasas moves into his initial exposition of Aquinas on the metaphysics of being, human psychology, and evil in chapters 2–4, he draws on the psychology of three paradigmatic reactions to evil noted in chapter 1: Rachel’s inconsolable cry for her dead children (Matt 2:16); the retreat of the survivors to small, earthly joys in Albert Camus’s The Plague; and the insistence on fatherly love in Anthony Flew’s “Theology and Falsification.” Knasas holds that these responses to evil, while certainly understandable psychologically, are limited in their ability to raise philosophical doubts about the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good creator God. “[T]he problem of evil,” Knasas says, “is generated by an inappropriate aggrandizement of persons and other things” (16). Knasas’s philosophical psychology draws on the metaphysics of being so prominent in this and his other works. The crux is this: Human persons are not just beings—potential forms endowed with existence. They are also “intellectors of being,” which renders them special “epiphanies” of being, and thus also of the good. In virtue of their ability to appreciate existence itself, the whole of created being, and its Source, human beings have a privileged status before God and moral obligations to their fellow intellectors. At the same time, Knasas argues, human persons are not philosophically quite as important as is often assumed, and the process of discerning being can play tricks on the human mind. Mentally taking in existents that lie at spatial, temporal, or conceptual extremes—a vast ocean view, a single atom, a fast...

Counseling Hume

David Hume is well known for his philosophical doubts about such things as whether there is an external world beyond our sense perception, and whether there are any rational grounds for believing that the future will resemble the past. But what would it be like to entertain such doubts in the context of one’s everyday life? In this paper, a fictional dialogue is provided in which a descendent of David Hume who brings such skeptical doubts to life, and consequently suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), is counseled by a Logic-Based Therapy practitioner.

응용행동분석의 특성과 발전배경

The purpose of this study was to define what the applied behavior analysis (ABA) is and what its distinguishing characteristics are by considering its philosophical assumption and historical background. To begin to understand ABA as a science, we should know that its philosophical assumption is based on determinism, empiricism, parsimony, scientific manipulation, and philosophic doubt. In addition, the defining characteristics of ABA studies must be applied, behavioral, analytic, technological, conceptually systematic, and effective, and it should display some generality (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968). In this study, the definition of ABA (Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 1987) is introduced and its developing background is described by grouping the historical studies into two areas: the Watsonian respondent conditioning studies and the Skinnerian operant studies. Finally, the trend of recent studies on Functional analysis of behavior (FAB), the important leadership and role of the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) and the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB), and also the current status and future perspective of behavior analysis in Korea were discussed.

On Being “Advantageously Unsuited” for Dealing with Evil

Abstract: I investigate epistemic limits intrinsic to the analytic method of philosophizing used by Michael Rea (Analytic Theology) and Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness). Rea claims analytic tools limited strictly to the purposes of theory building make analytic accounts “advantageously unsuited to deal with the reality of evil.” Rea's interpretation is conceptually distortive and problematic. I show how his use of the logical-practical distinction is unauthentic in dealing with the challenge of tragic evil and present a broad sketch of what I mean by “tragic.” I then elucidate how Rea abuses the epistemic limits of his method by misaiming analytic tools inasmuch as philosophical doubt cuts against any knowledge garnered in the epistemic practices of human beings experiencing evil. I lastly show that Rea's epistemic problems amplify in the theodicy defence of Stump, who uses an artificial construction of evil as suffering of “mentally fully functioning adults” shorn of any socio-historical location. While Stump's artifice of evil and epistemic doubt provides her the possibility for a general reason of moral sufficiency, she is unable to integrate the biblical narratives she expects will lend added epistemic assistance to her defence, so that her project ultimately founders by never really touching ground.

Analysis and plain speaking

This volume collects papers delivered at a conference, ‘Communicative strategies in music of the late 18th century’, held in July 2005 at Bad Sulzburg and attended by a number of distinguished European and American scholars of the period (those not represented by papers here include Elaine Sisman, James Webster and Dean Sutcliffe). ‘Late’ 18th century was a necessary, if not sufficient qualifier. Paul Cobley and Mark Evan Bonds set the historical scene well in their opening chapters, investigating how music found a wider public in the second half of the century, and catered to its mix of tastes. But in the rest of the book, as it turns out, all but two of the contributors restrict their examples to the Viennese trinity; so the title should really be Communication in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Narrow-minded definitions of the canon are common to many books of music analysis, but given the breadth of music-historical expertise here it is surprising to find no one engaging seriously with (for example) C. P. E. Bach or Gluck, two past masters of the art of musical ‘communication’. By itself this is regrettable. There is a good deal else, however, which goes to create the impression that some of the contributors are not really interested in the historical and sociological implications of the book's theme, but merely want to use it as a soapbox from which they can hold forth on traditional analytical preoccupations. This is unforgivable. It is far from a good sign when the first paragraph of Agawu's ‘Afterword’ talks of music having been ‘saddled with a communicative function by diktat’, and rehearses outdated philosophical doubts whether music ‘has any content to speak of’.

Pragmatist Doubt, Dogmatism and Bullshit

Pragmatist Doubt, Dogmatism and Bullshit

Mother and Son

Introduction In his essay: Hamlet and His Problems, T.S. Eliot conceived as an artistic failure, pointing at inexplicable manner which is obsessed with his mother's behavior; and how terms of an objective correlative, Gertrude is not only an inadequate object for emotions generated play, but also unable to support them. In other words, problem of play lies not character of Hamlet, but author's treatment of the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son. (1) But might be an image that distills Hamlet's emotional connection to his mother? Picture standing graveyard contemplating universal and fleeting nature of life, while also holding skull of Yorick, symbol of all that is wild, silly and ridiculous. Might such a juxtaposition of consciousness correspond to conceptual form of Descartes' Cogito, whereby a determined reason and a determined madness stand both together, and yet separate? By same token, while Elliot's superego considered Shakespeare, artist, incapable of controlling his disordered subjectivity and to transform it to literary tradition that preceded him or surrounded him, might philosophical form of Cogito, which Shakespeare implicitly pre-figures play, be form which helps to understand Hamlet's intense feelings towards his mother's sexual behavior? (2) In keeping with assertion that play as a whole is problematic, Eliot also suggests that Stoll is correct steering away from a psychological reading of leading character, terms of staying nearer spirit to Shakespeare's art. (3) In this respect, it seems that Eliot is correct asserting that some other factor must be responsible for Hamlet's emotions. However, asserting that dominating emotion is inexpressible, because it is excess of facts as they appear (4) seems to be misleading terms of Eliot's underestimation of play's philosophical dimensions, and degree that Hamlet's psychological response to his philosophical concerns spills over to his perception and judgment of his mother's behavior. In contrast, it will be developed how Hamlet's judgment of his mother's sexual behavior and her shameless attitude toward it, is intensified by his own restless sense of shame related to his unguarded philosophical doubts. A) Hamlet's Pre-Cartesian Doubt In keeping with Eliot's assertion that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, (5) most critics agree that Kyd probably wrote UR-Hamlet, performed during late 1580's and early 1590's. Considering that Kyd's version already contained elements of Ghost, play within play, etc, as well as conditions of Elizabethan stage and conventions of revenge tragedy, it would give great insight into Shakespeare's innovations and underlying intentions. Since primary source has been irrevocably lost, Shakespeare's intentions are not clear and remain shrouded mystery. However, contrary to Eliot's assertion that in earlier play motive was a revenge-motive simply; that action or delay is caused, as Spanish Tragedy, solely by difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards, (6) MacCary asserts that while questioning of role of avenger was a creaking convention genre of revenge drama, as demonstrated Spanish Tragedy, which closely parallels, it is undoubtedly raised to level of profound philosophical speculation Hamlet. (7) In other words, notwithstanding verbal parallels between two plays, Shakespeare was not, as Eliot suggests, merely revising text of Kyd. (8) In fact, as soon as audience begins to experience drama unfold before them, it is evident customary authority has been altered, if not inverted. Rather than being asked by Francisco, who is on duty, Bernardo, who is obviously anxious about strange visitations of Ghost who has been usurp[ing] night(I. …

On Certainty, Skepticism and Berkeley's Idealism

In this paper, I survey the way Wittgenstein reacts to radical philosophical doubt in his On Certainty . He deems skeptical doubt in some important cases idle, pointless or otherwise negligible. I point out that several passages of On Certainty make it difficult to judge whether Wittgenstein intends to address a skeptic or a metaphysical idealist. Drawing attention to the anti-skeptical nature of Berkeley's idealism, I go on to argue that the question is far from trivial: rather, it affects the way we should evaluate Wittgenstein's arguments in On Certainty in general. I finally attempt to explain why Wittgenstein remained ambiguous about the target of his arguments, and discuss the possibility of making room for the idealism/skepticism distinction in On Certainty 's framework.

Love: A Suspect Form , and: A Witch's Dictionary , and: National Anthem (review)

Reviewed by: Love: A Suspect Form, and: A Witch's Dictionary, and: National Anthem Stephen C. Behrendt (bio) Judith Infante. Love: A Suspect Form. Shearsman Books. Sarah Kennedy. A Witch's Dictionary. Elixir Press. Kevin Prufer. National Anthem. Four Way Books. Aristotle famously claimed that the difference between the historian and the poet is that "the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be." Poetry, Aristotle continued, because it deals with universal matters rather than with particulars, was "more philosophic and of graver import" than history. Despite Aristotle's fondness for binaries like these, his system left little room for what we call historical fiction—or fictional history, which is not quite the same thing. The writer of historical fiction begins with the empirical record, to be sure, but her or his interest tends less toward some sort of strictly photorealistic record of the past than toward a version of how things might have been, of how the [End Page 169] past appears when observed through the eyes and sensibilities of the age in which the work is composed. This is why I suggest that "fictional history" may be a better, fairer term than the more familiar "historical fiction." Certainly it seems more appropriate for the three books I shall consider here, each of which treats history in ways that interlace present-day sensibilities and preoccupations with what each author presents as an essentially historical framework. Start with Judith Infante's Love: A Suspect Form, the latest among many retellings (including Alexander Pope's famous 1717 poem) of the history of Heloise and Abelard. Over the ground bass supplied by the factual history of the famous twelfth-century lovers, Infante weaves a contrapuntal polyphony that voices the thoughts and passions of the principal players in this tragic drama. Because the seemingly familiar tale is not always remembered correctly, Infante's brief prose introduction traces its outlines while explaining how and why she has been drawn to the subject. Abelard, the self-proclaimed "Philosopher of the World" at the new university at Paris, and Heloise, the brilliant and highly educated niece of a canon at Notre Dame, became clandestine lovers after he became her tutor. She gave birth to the son they named Astralabe, but bowing to the expectation that Catholic teachers be celibate, they kept their marriage a secret. When Abelard later sent Heloise back to the convent, probably to cover himself, her uncle read the move as abandonment and took his revenge by having him drugged and castrated. The lovers subsequently took Holy Orders and saw one another only occasionally; Heloise eventually became an abbess, despite her evident disinterest in the religious life; the monk Abelard rose to the status of abbot, but his philosophical doubts led him into conflicts with the Church that eventually resulted in two trials for heresy and banishment to an isolated monastery; Astralabe was turned over to Abelard's sister and vanished from the historical record. Love: A Suspect Form consists, then, of the voices of Heloise and Abe-lard (primarily) extrapolated from the letters they exchanged for years after their separation, as well as the wholly invented voices of Astralabe (whose angry prose paragraphs reflect outcast status) and other contemporaries. Adding to the collection's rich intertextuality, each poem is preceded by quotations from Heloise's and Abelard's actual letters, from the Bible, and from the works of Ovid, whose work (widely studied in the medieval universities) provides the paradigm of metamorphosis and myth-making upon which Infante works her history-based variations. Abelard's poems reflect his uneasy posture between self-justification and self-pity: I am severed from the One who burns me.(He wants no offering whose testicles are cutor bruised or torn). I am less than a healthy goat. Yet she weeps. (Knowing I stand here in shadowto see her veiling?) Familiar with the classics,she addresses this wrong with a fitting quote— [End Page 170] Noble husband, too great for me to wed … ("Abelard: Suspect Form," 70) This is Abelard: learned philosopher who has Heloise quote the poet Lucan as she becomes a nun with lines...

North of Boston: Models of Identity, Subjectivity and Place in the Poems of Robert Frost

Although the titles of Robert Frost’s collections of poetry, including North of Boston, appear to ground his work in a precise location and a known community, the poems themselves belie any secure sense of geography and any secure sense of attachment. Many of the poems were, in fact, composed in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, and they reveal an acute awareness of British, as well as American, literary traditions and ideals. This essay looks at how Frost created the New England of his poems, subtly establishing lines of continuity with British and American Romanticism while simultaneously harbouring profound philosophical doubts about inherited models of poetic subjectivity and imagination. The place of poetry, for Frost, is seen to be a place in which the play of mind is, itself, the most pressing subject matter.

Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge

Philosophical doubts about moral responsibility have typically been rooted in worries about free agency in the face of causal determinism, culminating in familiar metaphysical arguments against the very possibility of moral responsibility. Recently, however, a skeptical argument has emerged that is simultaneously less ambitious and potentially more challenging to many of our common beliefs and practices concerning responsibility. It is less ambitious because the aim is to show not that agents cannot in principle be responsible for what they do but only that the ascription of responsibility or blame for bad actions is never warranted in any particular case. Since this more modest argument does not rely on the truth of determinism, however, the worries it raises for attributions of moral responsibility are likewise not mitigated by familiar compatibilist strategies for rescuing moral responsibility from the threat of determinism. The problems remain whatever one concludes about the underlying metaphysical issues. The strategy of the skeptical argument, as forcefully developed by Gideon Rosen, proceeds in two stages. The first task is to argue from

Hitchcock and Cavell

Stanley Cavell's philosophy and Alfred Hitchcock's films share a distinctive feature: they are both concerned with the relationship between doubt and romance. Cavell is a thinker who has forcefully articulated the idea that the narrative of heterosexual romance is a place where philosophical doubt or skepticism enters into the everyday or the ordinary. For Cavell, skepticism is the central problem that is confronted in the lives of protagonists who seek to enter into and sustain a relationship of intimacy, and classical Hollywood cinema is a privileged place for staging the relationship between heterosexual romance and skepticism. In the history of cinema, it is Hitchcock who has most consistently charted the vicissitudes of romance in relation-

Flirting with Virtual Reality

Psychoanalysis encourages patients to experience a virtual reality of the psychoanalytic relationship, in which both image and wish can be experimented with. Originally, the patient’s awareness was supposed to move back and forth between the virtual and the actual, in a flickering and uncertain fashion. That is uncomfortable, and analysts have often preferred the domain of virtuality or of actuality, or have denied the distinction altogether. Recent philosophical developments and doubts about transference neurosis and reconstruction further tempt analysts to relax the flickering uncertainty of virtual and actual. Patient and analyst may gain comfort but lose something in the process.

Psychoanalysis and the Body–Mind Problem

In this paper I have tried to clarify some of the differences between on the one hand ordinary doubts and uncertainties that are part and parcel of the psychoanalytic process, and on the other hand the sort of doubt that Socrates called ‘aporia’, that is, philosophical and conceptual. I have described one point at which philosophical doubt may creep into psychoanalytic thinking on body/mind issues. I presented a psychoanalytical model of the mind, based largely on Bion and Anzieu, in which mind is seen to be emergent from a body–mind nexus, to which we may, under pressure, regress. I elaborated this by reference to an example of my own somatisation, and to Anzieu’s theory of a skin ego. Finally I made some comparisons between philosophical solutions to anxieties arising both in the mind/body area and in general epistemology, and psychoanalytic approaches to similar anxieties in life.